Recognizing that achieving a balance of all eight dimensions of wellness is the key to health, it's easy to understand that when any one dimension is absent, inaccessible, or diminished, there's an imbalance that's formed. Using the snowball effect model (FIGURE A)...

(FIGURE A) The snowball effect is an excellent model for demonstrating how a deficit (or absence) in one dimension of wellness, can create an overall "bam" situation quickly.

... let's say that an individual who has a great overall wellness profile (healthy) loses their job. Now, in of itself, this is something small (FIGURE A, top left.) Financial wellness of the individual can mostly likely be sustained for a bit, particularly if a spouse or partner has employment. And even if not, perhaps a 401 (K), 403 (b) or similar could be accessed (hopefully without penalty) while looking for another job/career/position.

Sounds great , reasonable, and doable right?

Hmmmmmph...but let's keep it real!

Let's keep it real. The "sharing" economy has little benefit or "share" for the employee

So now, despite the accolades and accomplishments, months (unemployment compensation completely utilized) turn into years gone by, and the individual still hasn't got a new job. That something small (FIGURE A) has gotten bigger and rolled right into the "no going back point." Now, physical wellness (anxiety, stress, cancer, high blood pressure, chronic & preventable diseases) is gone. Financial wellness is shot (no income), homelessness is a real possibility (the sidewalks have no cushions and most shelters cot only during the night-daytime you're back to your own "d-vices"), emotional wellness is out of the door, social wellness is non-existent.

Now all of the dimensions of wellness are important. But one dimension, intellectual wellness, is often neglected, and it may be the most important or most critical. Colleges and universities claim to teach critical thinking; yet, as a student, as a pharmacist, as a college instructor, and as an university adjunct professor, I am pressed to demonstrate a time where critical thinking was really required, modeled or demonstrated (correctly.)

If a problem like cancer is solved-connected to its cause so that people could PREVENT it, then it seems that every health care provider (HCP) would want that...or is it that HCPs and payors fear that if there's no more cancer, there's no more problem (for patients) and subsequently no profit$$ for the payors and no job$ for HCPS. #criticalthinking

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Critical thinking, let's say of a socially conscious and transparent pharmacist would dictate that the pharmacist wonder (preferably) out loud why despite all of the didactic training, internships, rotations, PGY1 and PGY2 residencies, and maybe even elite fellowships AND critical thinking electives, the best they (can) do is SUPPRESS and MANAGE disease (s) while frequently supporting/creating financial toxicity (not just in cancer patients, either) through costs of drugs (complicit relationship with big pharma) and 6-figure salaries that require only that they fill prescriptions quickly without (bathroom) breaks while standing for over 12 hours worrying that the district manager is going to come down hard and they potentially lose their job (there's always a reserve army of pharmacists that don't mind suppressing diseases with drugs-there's student loans to be paid and luxury SUVs to be purchased) because they haven't met quarterly projections, or similar.

Now say what, now? Yep. Neither individual (patient) or provider (HCP) is connecting the dots, or dimensions of wellness. This is the root of the pervasive unhealthiness in the U S

During childhood years, one of the favored games (for rainy days-sunny days you played outside and that was that!) was connect-a-dot. Gosh, is it a wonder or surprise that connect-a-dot games (and even strategy board games) are resting in a pile of cast asides? (I think not)

Connect-A-Dot games used to be popular; but, now not so much. Coincidence? I think not.

Is there a snowball's chance in hell that we can start connecting these dots, these dimensions of wellness to have health?

1. We must understand our connection to each other and know that truly what happens to one without regard to race, color, current financial status ('cause that can always change up or down, in a twinkling of an eye) happens to us all.

2. We will need to connect the dimensions of wellness in order to build and maintain (individual and community) health. The frequently overlooked intellectual wellness dimension, will have to be especially incorporated knowing that there are groups, corporations, reports, industries, individuals, both secret and public, that enjoy and wish us all to be at odds with each other, while they direct, marginalize, and influence the world (=global transformation, new world order with no middle class-just rulers and serfs, a zero growth society, and centralized control of world populations by “mind control;” in other words, controlling world public opinion, and others.